What's In My Baggie - A Documentary Uncovering The Mystery Behind Party Pills

Is your ecstasy pill cut with brick dust? Is there even any MDMA in it? Knowing what’s in your pill is difficult, and with the growing assortment of research chemicals it’s getting even harder.

Pills are often cut with caffeine tablets, mephedrone or even brick dust. Unfortunately, more often than not, you are not getting what you expected. And that is no surprise really when you consider the situation: Drug dealers are left unmonitored and are primarily motivated by profit, not your wellbeing. When you combine this with the fact that the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction has reported the discovery of 243 new drugs since 2009, there are a lot of potential nasties that could end up in your baggie.

The irony of the situation: Prohibition drives the innovation of new drugs that seek to avoid current legislation, however, the new substances keep getting more dangerous than the ones the ban was aimed at.

To spread awareness on this, The Bunk Police – an American drug awareness organization – set out to educate festival goers by handing out free drug testing kits at festivals – so people can make sure that what they were taking was legit. Much to the organization’s surprise, they were denied entry by various festivals. Apparently, the festival organizers would rather risk their guests’ lives than find out whether the drugs they were going to be taking was actually MDMA, or some dangerous chemical fertilizer.

This is when the ‘What’s In My Baggie’ team decided to step in and make their own documentary on the matter. The crew set out to a few music festivals to test the drugs they found there, as well as conduct interviews with law enforcement officials, drug policy organisations, and dealers themselves. More often than not they discovered people were surprised to find out that what they had bought was not what they had paid for.

When you consider drug-related deaths are becoming a serious issue at music festivals, and that people are not going to stop taking them, no matter what the law says, it really emphasizes the need for educating people on drugs, instead of the government just burying their heads in the sand because “it’s illegal, so it shouldn’t happen.”